mother’s day hall of moms

It’s Mother’s Day and also my wedding anniversary, so naturally I’m sitting in a coffee shop enjoying my 4-5 hour weekly writing retreat! (My kids are too little to recognize/care what day it is, I visited my mom earlier in the week, and I’m taking the hubs on a date tomorrow because Mondays are easier, SO I GET TO HAVE THIS OKAY).

I’m extremely lucky in this regard: I adore my mom and consider her a role model and friend. I’m also aware that this holiday is fraught for a lot of people because they have more negative or complicated family relationships. And while I’m devoted to my blood family I’m also a huge believer in found family and mothering anyone who needs mothering, family tree be damned.

I have a large extended family in which the girls vastly outnumber the boys (if you leave out spouses, the current three generations total fourteen to four) so I naturally gravitate toward stories that feature mothers, sisters, and female friendships. THERE ARE NEVER ENOUGH.

Whatever your relationship to mothers and Mother’s Day, I hereby present some of my favorite fictional moms. Not very surprisingly, they’ve all been featured on my blog before!

Ellen Ripley! Supreme leader, love of my life, mother to a daughter she never made it home to, adoptive mother to a daughter she rescued, AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER, DO NOT SPEAK TO ME ABOUT SEQUELS.

I would also like to give the Xenomorph Queen a shout-out in this category. She is a ruthless monster doing anything she can to protect her babies, and I respect that. The climactic mom-versus-mom battle at the end of Aliens is the best piece of cinema ever created and you will never change my mind on this.

Xena had a son and hid him away for his own protection AND THEN LOST HIM, she had a daughter and then basically destroyed the entire Greek pantheon to protect her, and then GOT FROZEN IN ICE AND MISSED HER CHILDHOOD. Xena is peak warrior mom and I will never forgive the showrunners for hurting her this way. The other fabulous thing about Xena is that her own mom is still around, and in the early seasons of the show she periodically goes home to visit her, because she’s peak warrior daughter, too.

Sarah Connor isn’t always the most nurturing mother, but that’s because she has seen the future and it is FLESH-MELTINGLY GRIM. She is a ruthless badass single mom who is just trying to prepare her son to lead the resistance against the coming robo-pocalypse, and sometimes that means stressing resilience and weapons skills and self-preservation over sentimentality and reckless attempts to rescue your own mother from a mental institution. Her imperfections only make me love her more.

Maeve is a more recent addition to my mom squad, and the folks making Westworld better not screw around here because their storytelling is increasingly erratic and Maeve is the best thing they’ve got going on. I don’t care that she’s a robot and her kid is another robot and their relationship is implanted backstory, MOMS ARE MOMS and if Maeve does not rescue her daughter and escape to the real world I shall riot.

That’s right, Cersei Lannister, another flawed mother but also another mother who will ruthlessly do anything for the sake and legacy of her own children. I’ve only watched the first four-and-a-half seasons of the show and read none of the books, BUT that isn’t enough to stop me including her here. You a bad bitch, Cersei, but much like the Xenomorph Queen your dedication and motherly instincts earns my respect.

I should add to this graphic because Orphan Black deals with motherhood in so many different ways. Sarah is the total fuckup trying to become a better person for her daughter Kira (and realistically stumbling and backsliding along the way); she has a fraught relationship with her foster mother Siobhan and OMG WHY didn’t I include Siobhan in my squad before because she will also shank anyone who threatens her kids; Alison, another flawed mother with adopted children who has to work through her own crap and a bad relationship with her mother; and the unlikeliest murderous reformed mom of them all, Helena and her beautiful bebes.

As far as Malcolm in the Middle goes, Lois and Hal always stole the show for me. Lois does her best to keep four horrible boys on lock, even though they rarely appreciate it, and forms a united front with her husband, whom she loves dearly. She works her ass off to keep that chaotic household running, including working a crummy shift work job, because when you’ve got kids to feed and bills to pay you do whatever you have to do.

Amelia Peabody of the Amelia Peabody series is my favorite eminently practical heroine and mother to my favorite fictional child, Ramses, and if you threaten a hair on that kid’s head she will go berserk and beat you down with her equally practical and well-reinforced parasol. I’ve got a whole other post about her adventures right here. She’s the first and best of this character type, though there are others that I love. The best second-up has to be Alexia Tarabotti of the Parasol Protectorate series, though she somehow manages to be even more practical and less nurturing than Amelia is, and that’s saying something.

Finally, Morticia Addams is SUCH A GOOD MOM. The Addamses are kooky and morbid and deliciously goth, but they aren’t mean. They adore one another. They take care of one another. Morticia loves her children and indulges all of their interests, even when they don’t match her own. We see this in the second movie most of all. When she thinks Wednesday and Pugsley want to go to summer camp she lets them go, even though she and Gomez obviously find the place repulsive. When Pubert gets ill and turns into a rosie-cheeked baby with golden curls and angelic giggles, does she try to force him back to normal? NO. She sits in that boring white rocking chair and reads him Dr. Seuss like he wants. Because that’s what you do. Most of my favorite moms are ass-kicking action moms, but at the end of the day, Morticia Addams is the one to aspire to in everyday life.